Seagate Disk Drive for Digital Jukebox
Disk drive supplier Seagate Technology has announced that its U Series disk drive has
been integrated into the PDHercules digital recordable jukebox from Perception Digital
Ltd.
A digital jukebox audio system - one of the first to employ a specialized digital signal
processing (DSP) chip - the PDHercules achieves MP3 compression without the use of
a computer. It can compress music from CD, cassette tape, vinyl record or other format
into MP3 files, and store them on the built-in Seagate hard disk drive. Music from 500
CDs is available for future playback.
Music is stored via Perception Digital's patent-pending Rapid Archive System, which
requires only a sixth of the playing time (a 60-minute CD takes less than 10 minutes to
be stored). The user interface is equipped with a search engine for finding music by
song title, artist or album name.
Perception Digital develops high-end digital audio applications, audio-visual consumer
products and voice-based Internet applications for multimedia. Founded by several
professors and graduates from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in January 1999, the
company has previously participated in the entrepreneurship program at HKUST.
(July 2001 Issue, Nikkei Electronics Asia)
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